I get reimbursed for payments to the TOA hosting providers, domain name registration, and I got reimbursed once for a set of Drupal books. The monthly ISP gets paid for this server, which hosts TalkDesign. We bought this server back in 2005, IIRC, and the one Reed Cartwright has just begun hosting PT on. As far as payments to principals, there aren't any. It's in our by-laws that people associated with the TOAF are unpaid. We can get reimbursed for expenses associated with running the site (as mentioned above), but there's nothing beyond that. Current annual expenses are (by my guess) in the $1,600 ballpark for the technical end of things, with the purchase every few years of a machine at somewhere upwards of $3,000. Maybe we can call it about $2,600 per year, with the hardware costs spread out over three years. There may be some financial fees that we get hit with that I don't know about. Is the above helpful?

I'm reluctant to try to do a totalizer on current donations -- that's information that we don't really want others to know before the close of the auction. Likewise the number of years of operating costs at the ~$2,600 figure above... that would let another bidder know too much. If there were to be a totalizer, it would be up to Ken. I don't have access to the PayPal numbers.

I haven't added up the costs over the years, but Wesley's estimates sound about right. The only significant expenses we've had have been the server purchases and the annual costs of hosting the various websites (T.O Archive, Panda's Thumb, etc.).

The Foundation gets a very small amount of revenue (a few dollars per month) from people buying books through our Amazon links. We get occasional donations from people. We haven't needed to do much in the way of fundraising; between these two sources, we've generally made enough to cover the expenses Wesley listed.

Like Wesley, I'm reluctant to give donation totals in the interim, for the reason Wesley states. I will say that we've gotten a few thousand dollars in donations over the past 24 hours. I will provide a total once this process is complete.

Regarding returning donations: The Foundation's directors discussed whether this would be possible or feasible before I posted the donation request. You must understand that this possibility/opportunity of bidding on Expelled only came to our attention very recently (I only learned of it yesterday morning). If we had more time, we might have come up a different way to fund this project.

It may actually be possible to return donations if our bid is unsuccessful, and we will investigate that possibility. But we are not sure at this point that we will be able to return donations, and we did not want to make a promise we could not fulfill. Thus the disclaimer that we could not guarantee how the donated funds would be used. I don't want anyone feeling misled about what they're doing, and by all means, if you have any such concerns, I would rather that you did not donate.